IX. THE DEATH OF JOSEPH, MARY’S HUSBAND

The death of Joseph is nowhere either mentioned, or alluded to, by the Evangelists; yet, from all four of them it may be indirectly inferred to have happened whilst Jesus was yet alive; a circumstance in which, had they been imposing a story upon us, they would scarcely have concurred, when the concurrence is manifestly not the effect of scheme or contrivance. Thus in the passage from St. Matthew, quoted in the last paragraph, we find his mother and brethren seeking Jesus, but not his reputed father. In St. Mark we have the whole family enumerated, but no mention made of Joseph. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?” 6:3.

“Then came to him,” says St. Luke, “his mother and his brethren, and could not come at him for the press,” 8:19. “After this,” says St. John, “he went down to Capernaum; he, and his mother, and his brethren, and his disciples.” 2:12.

Neither do we meet with any notice of Joseph’s attendance at the Feast of Cana, or at the Crucifixion; indeed, in his last moments Jesus commends his mother to the care of the disciple whom he loved, and that “disciple took her to his own home.” Nor at a scene which occurred very shortly after his Crucifixion, though one in which all the immediate friends as well as family of Jesus are described as taking part; “And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas, the brother of James.

“These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren;” Acts 1:13, 14; the last time in which Mary herself is named in Scripture.

Such a harmony as this cannot have been the effect of concert. It is not a direct, or even an incidental agreement in a positive fact, for nothing is asserted; but yet, from the absence of assertion, a presumption of such fact is conveyed to us by the separate narrative of each of the Evangelists.